We try to discourage our students from mocking people just because they’re different. Even if there’d been some larger justification, it’d still be highly problematic, inasmuch as it strongly suggests that “bigger is better.” (Which is doubly egregious given the novel and show’s rejection of that logic.)

… you know, I honestly didn’t consider that. Given how awesome Tyrion is in general, making the one big person Tyrion and surrounding him with these scheming, completely shitty douchebags as little people… yeah, okay. That’s a bad idea.

Not having touched ASoI&F since I was 15, I can see in my mind how this could plausibly be an interesting portrayal. But given the humiliation actors who are little people are regularly subjected to, I can understand erring on the side of Fuck No.

In theory, reverse castings are an interesting idea. The problem is that in most scripts that would make them possible, the delineation between the two groups is so stark that the only lesson you can draw is ‘it would be different if this situation was opposite.’ Reverse Othello is sort of the worst offender in that regard.

I’m going to be charitable and assume your student was simply ignorant of the historical context, which in some ways is a victory.

And apparently the Reverse Othello was well-regarded for the attempt it was making. Avery Brooks, who is not precisely what you’d call without opinion on matters of race, has said he regretted he couldn’t play Iago in it due to the DS9 shooting schedule taking up all of his time.

Avery Brooks did play Othello several years later at the same theater.

I thought the race-reversed Othello was a good gimmick, if only because it gave a lot of very talented black actors the chance to shine in major Shakespearian roles. Patrick Stewart was a fine Othello, but the rest of the cast was equally good, and the production had the single finest set I’ve seen in twenty years of attending Shakespeare.

Yes, he is a very . . . theatricalactor. It made for some odd moments on DS9, but I suspect he was cast because he could live up to the Shatner legacy. All starship captains should play at Ham Factor 9.

if only because it gave a lot of very talented black actors the chance to shine in major Shakespearian roles.

This.

Being a black Shakespearian actor can be kind of tough, because there are a lot of roles you don’t look quite right for (and yes, that does matter) but there’s one enormous role, very famous, that everyone will just EXPECT you to be able to whip out.

Actually, the Avery Brooks Othello was several years earlier. What was truly amazing about that production, however, what that Andre Braugher played Iago. The director said that he never understood why Othello trusted Iago so deeply and quickly. The reason he came up with was that Iago was also black. But Iago had been the token black military leader and now this black superstar comes along… Thus the deadly revenge out of spite. And Desdemona was an Amazonian blonde with waist length hair, definately not the shy maiden she’s often depicted as. They also color-balanced the military. The combat troops were mostly black, with the officer corps getting whiter as the ranks got higher.

I think reverse Othello worked because the Shakespeare Theater is in Washington, has a long history of cross-racial casting, as well as seeing the plays through a heavily political lens (seeing as it is DC and all). Giving large numbers of black actors the opportunity to do Shakespeare with a great British actor at a prestige theater was just a bonus.

Patrick Stewart played Othello at the Shakespeare Theater in 1997. Avery Brooks played Othello there in 2005, with Patrick Page as Iago. Google informs me that he also played Othello in Washington DC at the Folger Library in 1990, with Andre Braugher as Iago; I wasn’t living in DC then, and didn’t see that production.

Very inside baseball here, but the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington (run by Amherst College) has a theater where they have long had performances. In the late 80s, Michael Kahn became the director, eventually setting up a resident theater company called the Shakespeare Theater at The Folger Library. It became enormously popular and eventually outgrew the small theater at the Library. This was the period where the Brooks/Braugher Othello was performed (side note: Kelly McGillis was to have played Desdemona, she was a member of the resident theater that year, and was in a magnificent Twelfth Night – the actor they got to play her twin brother really did look just like her, but she got pregnant).

I wan’t living in DC then but some bad blood, etc. and the Shakespeare Theater moved to a new custom made theater, which was a building where fancy condos were built with a fully modern theater inside. The whole creative team remained intact and they consider themselves a company that moved from one theater to another.Brooks and Braugher in Othello

Ah, I’d heard that they used to be in the Folger, but I’d forgotten, and, in any case, thought it was further in the past. I first saw a show at the Shakespeare Theater in 1994, and I didn’t realize they’d moved into the Lansburgh theater only a couple of years earlier.

I’m going to be charitable and assume your student was simply ignorant of the historical context, which in some ways is a victory.

I don’t emphasize it enough, but as I mentioned in this post, I do think that a lot of my kids’ cluelessness is predicated on the fact that they’ve grown up in a better world than the one I had to suffer through. And no, I’m not jealous … not much, anyway.

What about parallel Othello? I seem to recall a film from a few years back that had a British Othello operating in period Hong Kong. He was considered powerful but treated as an outsider and a barbarian due to his race. That works for me.

I had an exam question on Othello that asked us to give it the treatment that Dickens gave Romeo and Juliet in Nicholas Nickleby. We had to describe how we would turn it into a comedy.

If you made a good faith effort to do so, the best you could do was a C. If you did it but said it was a bad idea, you could get a B (like I did). The only way to get an A was to refuse to try, and explain why it was in such bad taste.

It was just a generic “Shakespeare” class. At the time, I thought the guy was a jerk. In retrospect, I don’t care at all about the grades I received but do appreciate the insights. We had a much more mundane assignment, for “As You Like It”, which I aced, but I can’t remember a damn thing about that play.

The Reverse Othello came about because Patrick Stewart wanted to play Othello, but didn’t want to do it blackface. He went to the Shakespeare Theater in DC with the suggestion. He clearly thought about how to do it right by chosing a smaller resident company in a majority black city which is known for cross-racial casting and political interpretations of the plays, rather than doing it as a stunt in London’s West End or on Broadway.

It’s the story of how a scheming nun, seeking release from an oppressive existence, ruins a man’s life, robbing him of his chance to recapture his honor and marry a rich, beautiful heiress. She bring chaos to his home, endangers his children while planting perverse ideas in their heads, and ultimate makes him an exile from his beloved homeland.

My worst idea was for an assignment to translate a piece of literature to a children’s book. I was a shirker in high school but I absolutely needed to turn it in to graduate. But that didn’t stop me from procrastinating, do I wound up needing something both brief and that I already read.

I had a creative writing assignment in college to rewrite Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, and turned it into the story of a couple of high school kids who get herpes. It started out, “It was one or two Van Halen concerts ago/In this hick-town by the sea…”

I’d rule it unacceptable on grounds that it’s lazy.
Reverse Othello is lazy, too.
You’re not changing any of the aspects of the story to view it in a new light; you’re just re-arraigning some adjectives.

Well, someone with whom we would instinctively identify, then.
Though I don’t think the audience is meant to identify with Othello, particularly. There’s too much dramatic irony around his misjudgement of Desdemona re: the handkerchief.

Something I’ve wondered occasionally: we like our heroes to be underdogs, because then it’s all the sweeter when they win.
Sometimes they’re just outnumbered: Bond on his own against the hordes of henchmen. Sometimes they’re physically smaller – Tyrion, or David against Goliath – or even injured or crippled. Sometimes they’re otherwise hampered: the villain’s very rich, or very powerful, or has a superweapon or something.
Could you have a story in which the hero’s handicap, if you want to put it that way, was that he just wasn’t very competent?

They may have some Las Vegas theater tickets in los angeles available from
an individual who needs to get rid of them.
Sponsors and major producers sometimes is the reason, all of the
music industry in many years. Apart from appealing to fans that wait until the” day of” to decide
what you want! April 26, 2013 WPVI — Once again, most of us
in the West Indies, however, we have prepared for you a detailed
step by step instructions on how to get into.